1 April 2005
Why Programmers Fail
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General .
Joel Spolsky writes:
A ridiculously small portion of the energy it takes to make a commercial software product actually goes into the writing of lines of code. I would estimate that out of every 100 calories expended by the Fog Creek team:
25 calories are spent on customer service
55 calories are spent on debugging, beta testing, and minor tweaks
8 calories are spent on marketing, including the Fog Creek website
5 calories are spent reading college kids’ resumes and interviewing said college kids
5 calories are spent on code that never ships, such as the online demo and the online storeLeaving just:
2 calories spent on actually writing new lines of code that ship to a customer.
This, I think, helps explain why so many software companies started by programmers fail: programmers are really good at writing news line of code, they might be good at debugging, but nobody ever taught them how to do marketing or customer service, and they are probably horrible at graphic design.
One Comment so far...
Larry Sabo Says:
3 April 2005 at 8:06 am.
Re Drive Cleanup Wizard, it would be helpful to be able to specify filer defaults as off rather than all on. I’d like to put the program on my clients’ machines but don’t want to rely on them to remember to turn off the filters.
Thanks for a terrific program!
Larry